


Easy as A B C

by Aphidity



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: AU where Rodimus becomes a medic on the fly, Gen, Gore, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 11:32:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14104449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aphidity/pseuds/Aphidity
Summary: In the aftermath of Nyon, one mech fights the desperate battle to stave off death just a little longer.





	Easy as A B C

It’s hard to get it at first.

Medicine was something for mechs sparked and forged to _be_ a medic, with skills and knowledge and orns and orns of practice. Not for flighty streetracers with trouble focusing on a task for more than a quarter-cycle.

It’s even harder when the slick tangle of pumps and wires you’re facing was once part of your friend. When so many nuts and bolts and pistons have rattled apart that it’s impossible to tell where mech starts or ends and you never knew frames could go grey so fast and another one falls and another one and another-

The frames pile up and hope is crushed to a choking death in his vents.

He’s not good enough. He never will be.

(Later on, a long time later on, a medic will take him aside and teach him the concept of ‘triage’. The medic’s name is First Aid. He’s a forged medic, but he’s also young and earnest and wants to help. Hot Rod likes him immensely. He doesn’t even mind when First Aid asks him to beta-read those self-inserts.)

His tyres are itching to hit the road as his base coding screams at him to _run run run_ , but he forces himself to stay where he is and tackle just one more wounded, one more dying. He’s not equipped or trained in any way, but maybe clamping the proximal lines will stop the bleeding? Maybe splinting the limb will save a total replacement? Maybe bolstering a guttering spark with fuel from his own lines will buy more time? Maybe, just maybe, he’ll be able to tip the desperate odds back away from death.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he knows that all lives are worth saving.

(Later on, another medic will take him aside and teach him resuscitation. The medic’s name is Ratchet. The cycles he spends learning under Ratchet are the equivalent of a house on fire as they go from patient to deteriorating patient, internally screaming all the while. Hot Rod doesn’t think he’s ever stopped screaming since then, but he’s also learnt that he can weld twice as fast as Ratchet can. He still can’t beat the Hatchet at wrench-slinging, though.)

His living nightmares are when mechs come in fine and leave dead. Sometimes, he can pinpoint the exact moment when things went downhill. When Diode developed unrelenting pain in his fuel pump. When Geartooth’s vents started rattling like a loose tin roof and wouldn’t get better. When grey started on Coiler’s left pede, then wouldn’t stop spreading until the rest of him was grey as well.

Sometimes, he doesn’t know what went wrong. Axle was fine after he was patched up, then he just keeled over dead. Uplink came in all quiet, and his spark just as quietly slipped away. He doesn’t know what went wrong, but he knows that he’s doing something wrong.

But what?

(Later on, a surgeon will take him aside and teach him management of emergencies. The surgeon’s name is Pharma, and he does absolutely nothing to hide his horror that Hot Rod knows practically nothing of medical principles in general. The mega-cycle that follows is a blazing Pit of a crash course and Hot Rod feels like he’s been dragged through the sun’s core. But now he knows how to listen, examine, assess, scan and intervene. He knows that he can’t do everything alone, and that the best medics work in teams.)

Mechs that make it past the first cycle don’t find much to rejoice in. Yes, the bleeding has stopped, but so have their peripheral sensors. The burns spared their spark but scorched half their frame into melted slag. Sometimes, they lose function in their pedes, or servos, or motors after clamping their lines. He’s saved them and botched their very function while doing so.

He can’t meet their optics when their fields start flaring in panic.

What has he done?

(Later on, a medical engineer will take him aside and teach him rehabilitation and prosthetics. The mech’s name is Hook, and he’s backed up by a whole gestalt of engineers. Hook finds fault with everything: that Hot Rod’s sketches are crude, his grasp of mathematics is shaky, and that he has no eye for detail. Their collective egos are unsufferable, but if they can design and build everything from cities to replacement frames, Hot Rod thinks they deserve that much. Especially after they looked over, cast, and installed his self-designed flame-thrower mods on his frame without any question.)

Some of the mechs he tries to help aren’t hurt very badly. Their frames are still intact, with minor wounds and scuffs. But something is wrong, in the way they look around, in their ragged field, in the way they move and talk (or don’t). Something inside is broken and he doesn’t know how to help, not when the pieces he breaks off himself aren’t enough to fill their hole.

He wants to give give give, he wants to burn himself and warm them, but then what would be left of him?

(Later on, a therapist will take him aside and teach him counselling. The therapist’s name is Smokescreen. He doesn’t _quite_ look like a mech whose job is to listen to mechs and their problems, especially when Hot Rod first meets him dealing cards at a semi-legal drinking establishment in the backstreets of Polyhex. But Smokescreen can flense a mech’s psychology from the way they talk, play and live like some Golden Age detective holovid, and he knows how to patch those invisible wounds as well as he knows how to play the house out. Although he cleans out Hot Rod at Praxus Fold ‘em first. Then Hot Rod himself gets a therapy session. It helps.)

It comes to the point where his subspace, servos, mind is empty. He has done all he can think of. He’s staunched their wounds with all the mesh he’s scrounged, he’s out of solvent to wash them clean, and if he drains any more fuel out of his lines then he’ll go grey himself. He’s out of everything. He doesn’t know what to do. He can only clench and unclench his servos, servos that were never forged to help and heal.

(Later on, a sort-of-medic will take him aside and teach him how to improvise. The sort-of-medic’s name is Spinister. Hot Rod really doesn’t know if that mech is a medic. He’s never met any medic that trigger-happy before, but the rest of his squadmates have absolute faith in him, and that counts for something. When he’s in a mood to, he teaches Hot Rod how to stretch solvent supplies, how to macgyver a temporary pump filter out of spare mesh patches, and even how to distill a med-grade substitute out of siphoned fuel. The last one, Hot Rod doesn’t practice very much.)

The smell, sight and sounds of the wounded and dying get too much, eventually. His heroism can only hold out for so long. The fire of his idealism has long died down to weak embers.

He can’t take it anymore. He can’t fight the screaming of his frame to get very, very far away from this doomed place of pain and slow death.

It’s the most natural thing in the world to twist his transformation cog just so, and speed away. Away from the mechs who need help, his help. It’s a miracle, a shameful miracle, that he still has the energy to spirit himself away so quickly after all those exhausting joors. Shame and guilt roil in his spark, but his frame sings with freedom from burden.

(Later, later on, another surgeon will take him aside and teach him how to drive. The surgeon’s name is Knockout, and he’s very critical of the rough-and-ready way Hot Rod tackles the roads. But the Velocitronian understands how Hot Rod needs the sear of screaming down the gritty roads without a care for his brakes or suspension, how the pain of wearing his tyres bald distracts him from the claustrophobic cage of responsibilities. Knockout teaches him how to drive in the opposite direction instead, _to_ those who need his help, how to channel the emotional high into focus and not fear. Hot Rod becomes a first responder, soon after.)

He’s worn himself raw in a futile fight against the cold bulwark of death. He’s frightened and alone and tired, and now he’s running away.

A coward, that’s what he was. Defeated, a fool, and a sickening coward.

He shouldn’t even exist.

(Later, later, much later on, he will walk in the great grey field where blue flowers glow like sparks. He will walk past the flowers, till all that is left is silence and vastness and Drift looking uncertainly at him. Instead of cold fear, anger will flicker in his spark, incinerate his field, flare out of his voxcoder in fighting words. Then he will raise his servos, whistle,

and challenge Mortilus once again for all those he lost.)

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was a really fun piece to work on, and I hope that everyone enjoyed it as much as I did! There will probably be a bit more about medic Hot Rod in time to come. In the meantime, comments are greatly appreciated!


End file.
